Me personally, I believe protesting doesn’t work without mass violence against those in power against your protest.
You think 4 billion people sitting peacefully in a park with signs and chants affects trump at all? Fuck no.
You show up with 200,000 angry fuckers with guns on his doorstep, and NOW he’s thinking about doing some kind of change.
United Health Care was planning on ending it’s coverage for anestesia. Now you’d have to pay, and pay a LOT. The business plan was "Pay us shitloads of money that you can’t afford, or feel the knife cutting you open during surgury. Your call.
Then Brian Thompson gets shot. Literally the next day United Health Care announced they would not follow through on their previously announced ceasure of anestesia coverage. They would remain covering it. Why? Because the board of suits asked “Am I next?”
Now ask yourself. If Luigi just held a sign in a park, and Brian Thompson were still alive, would you be able to afford anastesia today?
Nonviolent protests work fine, great even, they just have to be disruptive. The Civil Rights movement was largely nonviolent and got results because they striked, took up commercial space so commerce couldn’t operate, and gummed up the works so productivity stalls. The suits won’t care about violence either if they have ways of escaping, they only care about direct impacts, be it directed violence or economic harm.
Yea, the way I see it, it’s most effective to focus on removing power, and in a capitalist society money is power. You could try enacting change through violence, but the remaining people in power will still have the money to better protect themselves from violence, which just escalates the violence. If protests focused more on economic disruption, they’d be directly affecting more of the people in power than killing any individual while simultaneously reducing what power they do have, pushing them to concede to demands.
I think you can do a peaceful protest and still have it be effective, as long as it’s disruptive. Strikes are a good example. Rich people care about a protest as long as you can threaten their bottom line
Then Brian Thompson gets shot. Literally the next day United Health Care announced they would not follow through on their previously announced ceasure of anestesia coverage. They would remain covering it. Why? Because the board of suits asked “Am I next?”
This is not an accurate description at all. It was delayed in only select states, but they still followed through with that change for a vast majority of states. The only policy change brought by Thompson’s death was that UHC execs hired better security details.
Isn’t UHC being sued by its investors because they made policy changes that benefitted the insured instead of the investors after Brian Thompson’s death?
The story I remember is that the people working for uhc weren’t denying cases that they should have been.
Protesting is one part of a variety of anti-establishment responses. I’m tired of hearing people say it doesn’t work - obviously, on its own it doesn’t, but combine it with the many other aspects and there can be change. Of course, not everyone is fit to do every single one of the things required, but stop shitting on people who are trying to do even one of the things.
Protests are what get people fired up. Protests are part of what connect people and provide networking opportunities to organize other actions. Protests make people realize that they arenot alone, and that they CAN do something. Will they? Some of them will, and that’s the fucking point. Protests are a warning. Telling people “protests don’t work” only harms the fucking movement, so fucking stop it.
Why does it have to be Im shitting on them? Why can you just take a truth for what it is?
Just overly sensitive as if you understand the implication but are still in denial.
I’ve met people at protests who have organized boycotts, advocacy campaigns, fundraisers, and many many more things that enact measurable change. These people often meet through these types of events and I can guarantee you, if it wasn’t for rallies, I wouldn’t have even known where to start or how to find people that are doing the work.
Your “truth” is only true if you (or whoever the fuck you’re talking about) isn’t benefiting from the protest/rally/event. So maybe you should go to a protest and find a network and do some work if you feel like you’re not getting what you need from protests.
And just to be clear, I’m not judging people who only go to protests and then go home. That’s fine too. The whole point of activism is to do the best you can, and if it just means showing up on a weekend for 2 hours, that’s fine. Other people will see you, they will feel your support, and they will feel motivated to keep working toward whatever they were advocating for in the first place. That is the real point of protests.
Its your interpretation that I am saying “protest dont work.” Again, as if you feel some doubt in their effectiveness and are in denial. The point of my post was to comment on the protesters resolve.
Okay, so reading your title again, you are saying: people that only go to protests on their day off (and don’t engage in any other type of activism), think that protests don’t work. Is that accurate?
It has to be, right? If they felt they could truly effect change, looking at this world, they would be out there day in and out.
I disagree with you because protesting every day wouldn’t be an effective way to enact change. Like I mentioned, the point of protests is networking, solidarity and awareness-building. The change happens from the other actions that are less visible/get less media attention (fundraising, community building, letter-writing campaigns, putting pressure on local governments, boycotting, disrupting events, etc.). Going out to a protest every single day would ignore the actual work that needs to happen, and it would burn you out almost immediately.
There’s a difference between protesting every day and being willing to sacrifice. If you think you can effect change through passionless inaction Id ask for you to show me. Show me one good example.
No trust me bro one more protest and we defeat facism, just one more bro. The 3.5% bro trust they are losing for real bro.
Nah man, you are just engaging in free boot licking propaganda for absolutely no reason. World is what you frame it to be, and you sound like you’re on the side of sociopaths here, trying to frame your way out of your own shitty ass behavior and/or fatalism
Thats a really scary thought. I hope you dont really believe that about me. Can I do something for you that might help you feel better about the situation?
yeah but movements take time to build. BLM had almost a decade of build up before 2020.
Obviously we need to speed run this but also things start “somewhere”. The police assaults and response to the BLM protest of 2019 and 2020 did more to radicalize normies than anything has previously. Like, more people understand the contradictions of this country than ever before
People also believe the earth is flat. What’s your point?
